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[http://www.lizziebennet.com/ The Lizzie Bennet Diaries] ended its 100-episode run, bringing to a close Hank Green and Bernie Su’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Having seen positive impressions of the series on Twitter, I included the first episode in my screening of webseries for my Intro to Television class, which of course meant watching it myself before assigning it. Watching the first episode turned into the first twenty, and then the next twenty, and then I was caught up in time for the last half-dozen or so episodes that have been released this month. I consider the show to be a tremendous accomplishment, and I am sad to see it go: while I will admit that I would have found only 6-10 minutes of the show each week to be somewhat frustrating, and believe that my binge viewing highlighted many of the show’s achievements, I also missed the opportunity to “live” The Lizzie Bennet Diaries with other viewers. As someone who writes episodic television reviews, I believe in the value of discourse in shaping how we experience texts; as I’ve been following members of the creative team on Tumblr, or the official show Twitter account, and talking with other viewers on my Twitter feed about the most recent episodes, I can’t help but wish I’d have been able to spend the last fifty weeks within that space. Perhaps it’s fitting, though. It calls attention to one of the primary takeaways from the Lizzie Bennet experience, which is the degree to which engagement is a sliding scale within an online space. Some people followed the canonical Twitter accounts, Facebook updates, and spinoff webseries that coincided with the 100 episodes of the main series; other people followed some of the transmedia components; other people simply watched the main videos—as I mostly did for my own viewing, at least initially—and let the rest be the rest. This isn’t revelatory, nor unexpected: the show’s writers/producers have been upfront that they’re creating a story they know will be consumed in different ways by different people. It nonetheless bears repeating, however, as the show reaches its conclusion: as viewers say goodbye to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, what precisely they’re saying goodbye to may vary depending on their individual experience, to a degree that one doesn’t see with a normal television series (or a “normal” webseries, for that matter, although suggesting there’s a “normal” for a form so comparatively new and experimental may be misguided). Which brings me to “The End,” the final episode of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries''story, and a decision that the creative team has suggested came early on: despite the fact that Pride and Prejudice is centered around the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and William Darcy, ''The Lizzie Bennet Diaries ends on Lizzie, her sister Lydia, and her best friend Charlotte. Writer Jay Bushman, asked on Tumblr when they decided that Darcy’s swan song would be Episode 99, “Future Talk,” responded that “since we spent the first 59 episodes on her relationships with people other than Darcy, it would feel pretty lousy if the show ended with her only focused on him without any recognition of all the other people in her life who are so important — and all the other relationships that make our version of this story different than all the others.” It’s a compelling argument, and I did a literal—yes, actually literal—fist pump when I finished “Future Talk” and saw from the preview for “The End” that Darcy was absent. It reflects conversations I’ve had about how the show’s characterization of Lydia was its biggest accomplishment, and its most substantial “addition” to the Pride and Prejudice story as far as adaptation goes. I had skipped Lydia’s videos on my first viewing of the series, but was told by fellow academic Kathryn VanArendonk to go back and discover what I had missed, and I was immensely glad I did. Lydia’s story is heartbreaking, and powerful, and demonstrates the power of transmedia as a storytelling tool better than any other part of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. And I’m afraid that, despite her presence in “The End,” that Lydia will not endure as the legacy of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in the way I desire. http://memles.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/screen-shot-2013-03-28-at-11-52-44-am.pngNote that I’m not suggesting it is some sort of great injusticefor Lydia to be marginalized: as I noted, everyone has their own context for how they consumed and received The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and I would not create a hierarchy of my engagement over theirs. However, at the same time, I had a moment of frustration when I saw the—admittedly not final—box art for the Lizzie Bennet DVD that is a part of the production’s highly successful Kickstarter campaign. It features Ashley Clements as Lizzie Bennet, obviously, but second billing goes to Daniel Vincent Gordh, who also appears on the cover as William Darcy. While the back of the DVD features Lizzie, her sisters, and her best friend Charlotte, the front of the DVD eschews the series’ stated focus on Lizzie’s broader interpersonal relationships in favor of the dominant romantic relationship in the story. It’s possible that this is a contractual issue, which I understand. I also want to emphasize that I like Gordh in the role, and hold no ill-will toward him. I also understand the logic that drives decisions like this one (even if the box art changes, someone decided to create a mockup structured accordingly). The “Dizzie” videos have been among the most watched and rewatched, the anticipation of when Darcy would appear (and what he would be like) percolating within fan discussion for over half the show’s life. The longer Darcy went unseen, the more important the character became within fan discourse, and once he appeared his subsequent reappearances became “special episodes” by nature of their exclusivity. In preparing for Darcy’s final episode, I went and found—and rewatched, I’m only human—a YouTube playlist of all of Darcy’s appearances, meaning that someone has created the ability to experience “The Dizzie Bennet Diaries” isolated from the larger narrative. It makes sense, given both this buildup and the fact that Lizzie and Darcy’s relationship has been so central to the source material’s larger cultural footprint, that their relationship would be a central point of promotion for the series, just as it’s a central part of fan cultures: you see a lot more GIF sets or fan art for a romantic relationship than you do for a non-romantic one, and that goes for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries''as it would with any other series. And yet it still strikes me as underselling the show’s appeal, in that I don’t want the nuance of Lizzie’s relationships with Lydia, Jane, and Charlotte to be marginalized within how people experience the series in the future. I don’t want to oversell how much a DVD box cover—which could just as easily change between now and then—or an unofficial YouTube playlist or a non-exhaustive survey of Tumblr feeds play a role in the series’ legacy; in the end, they’re small parts of a larger web of textuality that will be mediated more by audiences than by artifacts. However, as the series comes to a close, I can’t help but feel that Lydia’s story ''should ''be the one that everyone is talking about; as much as I was emotionally invested in Lizzie and Darcy’s inevitable pairing (I spent a good twenty minutes filtering through Tumblr tags last night, to speak to previously mentioned humanity), it was the surprise of Lydia that best captures what makes ''The Lizzie Bennet Diaries distinctive. This is primarily because Lydia’s story is a distinctively transmedia one, whereas Darcy’s story—while tied to the transmedia environment through a Twitter feed that was, for a time, the character’s only self-representation—is a more traditional narrative, albeit told in absentia. What I found so compelling about Lydia’s story is that I almost entirely missed it the first time through: with only so much time, I just powered through the playlist of Lizzie’s videos and never thought to click on Lydia’s videos appearing simultaneously. Whereas those watching from the beginning would always be in need of more content and likely at least test out the extension narratives (which also include Maria Lu’s videos from Collins and Collins and Gigi’s Domino videos), I had Lizzie’s videos to consume my attention, and so when Lydia’s situation was revealed in Episode 84, “Ugh,” it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to Lizzie (except that I’ve read Pride and Prejudice, of course, but my memory of the novel is not such that I could have pinpointed the full details of the plot to remember Lydia’s transgression).